Handmade - Part One

a memoir

Trigger warning - there are references to suicide

Handmade

Adjective: made by hand

Handmaid

Noun: a personal maid or female servant, someone whose essential function is to serve or assist

PART ONE

Beginnings

For much of my life, particularly my childhood, I only ever remember wishing that my mother was someone else. I dreamed of a mother who was everything Alma was not: a cosy, plump, stay-at-home-mum, who could be found waiting at the school gates or at home making the tea. I admit I fell back on cliches. I also dreamed of a mother I did not have to take care of but one who took care of me. A mother who would not leave. A mother who allowed me to be myself, who was understanding and tolerant, loving, warm and compassionate. Above all I longed for a mother who was happy.

I have long since left such dreams behind, what matters to me now as I grow older, as I watch a new generation of my family come into the world, is the search for the real, not the imagined mother. I need to go back to the beginning to discover who my mother Alma was and who we were in relation to each other. I need to try and make sense of it all.

But where to begin?

'Begin with the clothes,' I hear Alma say. Clothes were our universe. The hand smocked dress, the woollen mittens, the yellow skirt with the patched pockets and daisy petal buttons - she loves me, she loves me not. Begin with her art, her Singer sewing machine, soundtrack of our days, its endless spill of fabric covering feet and floor. The clothes she made me. The clothes she wore. Begin with her rage. The letters she wrote disowning me. Her pen pushed hard into the thin paper until I am no longer her daughter. Her words: nothing you could ever do or say would be of any interest to me now.

Begin with M, my brother, five years my junior who I looked after and loved most of all. Begin with the out-of-doors kingdom: estuary and sea, the wide, flat landscape of our domain. Two small children on the edge of a tide, poking sticks in mud pools rescuing the small white ghost crabs of themselves. Begin here, near the beginning? Or begin in happier times? Begin now.

Washing Lines

2024

I step into the garden, a laundry basket under my arm. The first signs of spring are emerging, the earth is greening and there's warmth in the sun. I put the basket down on the damp lawn, unfasten the washing line and hook it into place. I avoid looking at the amelanchier: an old friend, a shrub grown into tree but now leafless and dying. I peg out the washing. White blouse, blue nightdress, denim shirt, cotton jumper, billow in the wind, casting their shadows like script across the lawn. A story told in clothes.

I stand back, survey the washing and think of my mother Alma. Alma died when she was seventy. I have lived to see three more springs than her. I am seventy-three. It's not easy to write this. Such an admission feels as if it belongs behind the latticed screen of a confessional. A sin and something to be ashamed of. The world is not kind to older women. But like most seventy-three-year-olds, despite my old bones, on a good day I am as young as I ever was. Age is as much a social construct as a biological one. I am all the women I've ever been or ever will be. I am still my mother's child.

Clothes hang on the line like selves shed, loose and hollow, an empty sleeve, an open cuff. The silent dance of colour, pattern, cloth are all reminders of her. Alma was a dress pinned down, straining in the wind, occasionally flying off over the fence to gardens beyond, returning wrinkled and stained with mud.

The washing line stretches far into the distance, back over the flooded fields of my childhood. Over cowslip and mud, estuary and tide. The problem with remembering and looking back is that sooner or later Alma appears in every frame. I cannot escape her. She is everywhere.

For too long I've held on to the anger and shame of life with Alma. Still after all these years, I'm searching for something to make sense of it all. I unpick the seam of our story again and again. I try to convince myself that what's dead is gone. Time loosens the stitches, the edges fray but the seam holds fast. As I watch a new generation of my family, three small granddaughters, begin to make their way in the world and as I marvel at who they might become, I need to know more than ever who Alma was. How life with her shaped me. Above all I need to understand how a mother comes to disown her child.

Hagen Daz Vanilla

2024

I sit up in bed, phone in one hand, spoon in the other. Balanced between my knees is a tub of Hagen Daz vanilla, left over from Christmas. J lies sleeping beside me. Oblivious. In the dead hours of the night, I am searching. Searching. You can ask Google anything. Sometimes the answer is banal or inappropriate, but just sometimes it's a revelation. What's sparked this latest bout of interrogation? I don't remember now, a casual remark, a fleeting memory, the washing line? Sooner or later something always sparks it. I am looking to unravel the threads of mother and self, the knot that refuses my attempts to untie. I scroll and scroll, and just when I think it's time to give up, to abandon ice-cream and contemplate sleep, I come across it, the question: Are you the daughter of a narcissistic mother? Take this quiz and find out...

Box after box, Does your mother do this? Did she...Do you...? Box after box, and every box ticked. It's too neat, too easy a solution. Surely? But something feels right, the words, the questions, my skipped heartbeats, the prescience. I buy the book; of course there is always a book. I download it and read through the night. I am hooked. Here am I, hiding in plain sight among its pages.

Perhaps this is where it begins, long past the ending, a reflection in a pool. Narcissus, son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope, who fell in love with his own reflection in the waters of a spring. Is Alma Narcissus? Am I her Echo falling in love only to be rejected, destined to live in a lonely cavern until nothing but my echo remains?

As J sleeps and ice cream melts, as first light penetrates the curtains, I return to my life with Alma; its contradictions, it’s deep drawn wounds. I glimpse the scattered selves, the photographs she cut me from. I peer back to what lay in the small, cramped, space of our beginnings.

Hospital Gown 1

2001

It’s July 2001, the year of my fiftieth birthday, when I take the train south. In the five and half hours it takes me to arrive at the small seaside station of Weston-Super-Mare, I lean my head on the window, taking account of the scenery, naming the passing towns and cities, doing my best to quell the panic. I cannot read, which is how I would normally pass a long journey. I drink a scalding cup of tea from the trolley. Tea not coffee because I know coffee will make me feel more nauseous than I already do. I cannot eat. I am no longer myself, no longer a mother with children of her own. I have returned already to that place of being Alma's child. That dark, uncertain, fearful place. The place of leaving and returning. The train back and forth and always sickness in the pit of my stomach. Only this time, I haven't seen Alma in three years. Not since she disowned me and as I will later discover, cut my face from all the family photographs. Not since the very thing I'd feared for fifty years, the shadow I'd lived under, had finally come to pass.

I cannot know what will happen when we come face to face. I'm prepared for Alma to refuse to see me and to send me away. At least then I can say I've done my duty, turn around and flee back to the safety and love of my own family. I hold my breath as I step out of the train onto the platform of home. I take a taxi to the hospital, alone. My father, Kit, who knows I'm coming, who has asked me to come, prefers to avoid the meeting between Alma and myself. And I prefer to go alone. It's in keeping with who we both are. Kit, passive and avoidant. Me in my safety zone relying only on myself.

It’s degrees warmer. There is salt in the air and balm in the wind off the sea. I climb out of the taxi, take off my jacket and push it down into my bag. I enter through the revolving doors and take the lift to the second floor as instructed by Kit. The corridor to the ward is long. I swallow hard, my mouth suddenly dry, my breath ragged. I swallow the past three years. I swallow the past, the silence between us. I am walking on broken glass, body tensed for attack, in full fight or flight mode. Sick with fear, I push through the swing doors. And there she is, Alma, in the bed beside the nurses’ station, facing me as if in wait. Alma, for all the world looking like a child, like the girl she once was. The hungry girl who ate the last piece of cake in the tin when the cupboard was bare. I cross the ocean of space between us and put down my bag...

Hospital Gown 2

June 1951

Alma is twenty-one when her waters break and Edith calls Gibson's for a car to take her to the hospital. She's been drinking raspberry leaf tea for the past month under Edith's instructions and the labour is coming on fast. The hospital is in the town of Bridgwater, in Somerset, once the centre of the cloth trade which seems appropriate for a young woman apprenticed to a tailor. It sits on the banks of the Parrett, a sluggish, silted, river that runs six miles before it meets the sea, down through the Levels to the sandbanks, mudflats and saltmarsh of Bridgwater Bay. Not that Alma has ever shown much interest in how the land lies beyond her immediate world.

And who can blame her now. Now she is alone, with not a clue as to what might happen. Later she will say, though she knows it sounds impossible, she had no idea how babies were born. She is convinced she's going to die. There are curtains around the bed. They've taken her clothes and she's lying in a hospital gown. They bring a bowl of water, soap and a brush. They shave her down there, God only knows why, then leave pulling the curtain closed around her. The bed is bone hard. She can't ever imagine getting up from it. She's beginning to lose the use of her legs. Pain consumes her. There is only pain, mingling with the disembodied voices of other cloistered, curtained women, crying out for Jesus, cursing the very hour of their birth, wishing death on themselves and all who'd landed them there.

It grows dimpsey outside. A fat midwife pokes her head through the curtains to check on Alma and determines the baby is on its way. Alma vomits into a grey, cardboard potty. They wheel in gas and air. It's hazy then, a lot of shouting and pushing and splitting in two, until a baby emerges, eight pounds two ounces. They take the gas and air away along with the child and begin the job of stitching her up.

All Alma wants to do is sleep. Sleep for a thousand years. Sleep and never wake up. And never feel such pain again.

'What'll you be calling 'er my love?' asks the nurse who brings the baby back for feeding and has shaken Alma awake.

'Avril,' murmurs Alma, in a voice more underwater than on land.

Feeding doesn't go well. Alma dreads it. Day three and she cannot bear her daughter near her for the pain.

'The baby bit me says Alma.'

'Rubbish dear,' says the nurse. 'Babies don't have teeth. Look.' The nurse prises open Avril's mouth, a pink gummy mouth with not a tooth in sight. 'See.'

Alma nods but she knows different. She knows that her daughter bites her.

The baby bites her mother but no one cares. There's no one to take away Alma's pain.

'You bit me when you were born,' Alma tells me.

I can't remember how old I am when she first accuses me, somewhere around eight or nine.

'You bit your own mother,' she says.

Boots in Mud

And where you might ask, was her husband, my father, Kit, Londoner born, stranger in a new county, while Alma struggled to give birth?

When Kit is demobbed in 1946, he puts away his officer's uniform, the one that caught Alma's eye when he was home on leave, and moves to Highbridge where his family have been evacuated from London's East End. Their house sits on the banks of the river Brue alongside the great iron doors of a clyse that dam the river's mouth. He finds work digging peat, travelling on the old Somerset & Dorset railway out to the once-upon-a-time fallen trees, reed and moss of the moors. He will tell me later how grateful he was for those mornings. His boots in mud, foot resting on the cutter, grass snakes skimming the dug outs, kingfishers and herons looking on.

By 1951, when they are married and Alma is giving birth, he is close to another river, still out in the flatlands. But now he's indoors on the factory floor of what was to become Bristol Aerojet, in Banwell, where he will spend his working life, though he will never relinquish his love of the land about him: the Levels, the hills, among them the Quantocks and Mendips; the lie of the land, the counties, the coast. Place in all its divergence, a map of here, a map of beyond. After all, Kit was a sailor and his father before him a merchant sailor from London via Waterford, who came home with exotic stories to tell of the East, of Africa and the Americas. But for now, Kit is in Somerset oblivious to Alma's pain.

On Becoming a Grandmother

This year - 2024 - the year I begin writing Handmade is the year my granddaughters Elsie, Lilah and Freja, turn three. I am just learning how to be a grandmother but already I cherish the gift of unconditional love, the joy of hearing the word: Nana, the joy of watching and listening to them as they make sense of language and the world around them, as they learn and take delight in simple things. Their wonderment, going on adventures, watching the birds, watching the dark, looking for the stars and the moon. Then there is the sheer, beautiful, physicality of it all. The way small children throw themselves at you, climb on your lap, burrow into your shoulder, put their hand in yours. How small, how soft, how warm those hands are in mine. How innocent and how trusting.

How small and trusting my own hand must have been at the age of three.

The Travels of Babar

At the age of three, I am living with Alma and Kit in a terraced house at the bottom of Oxford Street near the junction with Love Lane, in the town of Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset. My grandmother Edith and my grandfather Jack live close by on the opposite side of the street next door to the Crown Hotel pub. I am often with them.

It is not yet dark, more like dusk, a summer evening when the light penetrates the nets and the closed curtains of the bedroom. The child is in her grandmother’s house. She stands up in her cot which is wedged in the corner of the bedroom between the window that looks out onto the backyard and the dressing table where Edith keeps her brooches. The child cries. She's not sleepy and doesn't want to be alone. Before long there are footsteps on the stairs, the door opens. It's Kit. She stops crying.

Kit comes over to the cot and lowers the side. The child sits down, thumb in her mouth. The child will suck her thumb well into adulthood. Kit sits beside her and opens the book. This is the book she chose yesterday, when he took her to the library for the very first time. The Travels of Babar, by Jean de Brunhoff. Kit holds out the book, showing her the pictures as he reads. The words and the images transport her. The story takes flight, a film unfolds. Her imagination soars. She is in the balloon, travelling with Babar, looking down on the vast plains and the animals below.

This is the first of many stories Kit will read to her. Not only will he read stories, but he will tell them, he will invent them. Kit is a storyteller; books, words, images, and her father Kit are what help to keep her safe and let her dream.

Woollen Mittens

Across the road from Edith's, we share our rented house with a woman whose name I do not remember and her baby. My sense is of a kindly presence. I have no memory of a husband, but I can’t be sure. He may have still been in the Services. She may have been a war widow.

Unlike Edith's, it's a dark house where shadows play, where they flicker in the hissing light of the old gas lamps. We will live here until I am five, two more years before it is condemned as unfit, and we move to the newly built council houses in Highbridge.

In this cold, damp house I go to bed with woollen mittens tied round my wrists. My small room on the second floor at the back feels distant from the other rooms. I'm frightened of the shadows on the wall.

Memories are few at this age. Returning to this time, I'm a traveller confounded by fog. The fog lifts momentarily: Edith's house, a child in her cot, a front door in need of painting, a tiled hallway, a baby crying, a sheepdog bigger than me and a small backyard with a brick wall. Is Alma here? If so I barely see her. She is an illusory figure standing at the sink, perhaps bent over a sewing machine.

What I don’t remember, what I have no recollection of, is my three-year-old hand-small like my granddaughters' hands-clasped in Alma's as we stand on the side of the road, down from Edith and Jack's, and prepare to cross over to our house. I only know because Alma tells me, that on this day, in this moment that I have no recollection of, I take off and run out into the road.

I don’t know for sure if we were holding hands, I assume we were. Perhaps she let me go, perhaps she was steadying the pushchair. But what she will tell me some years later is that I ran out in front of a milk float and the driver had to slam on his brakes.

'The poor man was beside himself,' she said. 'He could have killed you. And I was beside myself. You could have died. That's why, ' Alma said, 'I gave you the hiding of your life.'

I don't know where the hiding took place, on the street there and then or when she got me home indoors? What I do know because Alma told me, was that my grandfather Jack came to the house that night, stood in the living room and announced that if Alma ever beat me like that again he and Edith would have to take me from her and I would go to live with them.

Why did Alma tell me this story? Perhaps she felt guilty and needed to confess, but it didn't feel much like a confession. She didn't say she was sorry. Sorry was not a word that Alma used. There was no hint of regret in her voice, she seemed to imply it was down to me. It was my fault, and anyone in her position would have done the same.

I want to think she was deeply ashamed and telling was her way of overcoming the shame. I try to remember that she was young. She was twenty-four and beginning to see her life stretching out before her like a straight jacket in waiting. But who beats a three-year-old child?

I have no idea how my grandfather knew about the beating. Perhaps it took place in the street for all to see, perhaps the woman who lived in the house with us told him. Perhaps word got around. It was the kind of street where people knew each other's business.

Was Kit there when my grandfather called? Was he home from work? Did he have something to say? Who knows?

I only have Alma's account, her words for which I was merely the receptacle. I have no way of knowing what it really meant, other than to think what it is to be three years old like my little granddaughters and how unthinkable it is that they should be beaten. Or to compare it with the rage that surfaced at other times or with a beating years later that I remember well. I have no way of knowing if there were other good hidings that I've erased from memory.

What I do know is that always, from childhood into adulthood, I was fearful whenever I was in Alma's orbit. I was afraid to defy her. I was afraid to do anything to displease her, anything that might incur her wrath.

What If My Body Was a Tree

2024

It rains all morning. I am out with my son and twin granddaughters. When I come back I sit in my study and look out of the window. The sky is cloudy and grey, the world outside as pale as a painting by Winifred Nicholson. A certain, soft, sadness lies beyond the flowers on the windowsill. In the garden, the apple is in bud. A blackbird sits on the leafless arms of the amelanchier.

I've been writing about the hiding Alma gave me. It is much on my mind and I think, what if my body were a tree? How would it be if Alma had set about a young tree, a sapling, instead of me? How would it be if I stood to one side and watched as she gave the tree the hiding of its life? Beating it hard, snapping branches, exposing sapwood to air, opening up the wound, carving her initials on its trunk. Could I bear to watch?

I want to shout, 'Stop,' but I am as silent and still as the blackbird at night.

I go back to the quiz. I am always going back to the quiz. I go back to the literature.

I discover that narcissistic rage is an intense reaction which occurs when the narcissist's sense of self and of self-worth is challenged through criticism, when there is a loss of control, even through minor setbacks. A child faced with such rage has very low odds of victory. The threat is high and the only options are to freeze or submit. To fight or flee will only further enrage. I think about all the times I've been hurt or betrayed, how I do not know how to fight back. For others yes, for myself, no. I think how I become silent, how I feel myself slipping away inside myself and closing down.

When a tree is carved into, the carving does not heal over, the damage remains. It is permanent.

Sea Dreams

There is something special about growing up by the sea. You cannot grow up near the sea and not forever hear its call, the sibilant whisper in the shell of your ear. You cannot fail to taste its salt on your skin, to smell an incoming tide on the wind. You cannot live by the sea, and not look to the horizon and wonder what lies beyond. For many years the sea will inhabit my dreams, in the best of them the tide is high like a millpond, water lapping, lambent; me slipping into its hold, floating in its pearly sheen. In the worst, crouched in fear, I watch the sky darken as a tidal wave grows on the horizon.

Burnham-on-Sea has the second highest rise and fall of tide in the world. When the tide retreats there is only sand and mud, a mega tonnage of mud, stretching out to a frill of water on the horizon that is the Bristol Channel. These are the dangerous times. Beware the quicksand that can swallow you whole. Beware the jetty where the strong currents lurk waiting to suck you down. Do not swim when the flags are red. Every year in Burnham someone, most likely a stranger not heeding the warnings, drowns.

But for those who know and respect the sea, there is comfort in its rhythm and its constancy. Similarly in the way in which it transforms itself, in its changing light and reflection. You may find yourself there in all its seasons.

A spring equinox. Waves breech the sea wall and a tide weighted with mud and kelp runs down through the town, through College Street, Princess Street, it runs across the pub yard, slips under the back gate up over the flood step, into Edith's kitchen. Tomorrow she will sweep the kelp and the shells, the black driftwood and the bleached bones of sea creatures from her back yard.

I will dream of the sea often. I will dream of floods and tsunamis. For now, aged three, I sleep with the shadows cast on the bedroom wall and wake with the gulls. I breathe the salt that lives in the air as Alma pushes me in my Silver Cross pram up College Road towards the seafront, to the photographers where I have my picture taken.

The Smocked Dress

In the few early studio photographs that remain, I'm wearing a white dress, smocked in purple. I am the sand when the waves have retreated. I am rippled in thread. According to Alma, I am the best dressed baby in Burnham. This is something she will refer to often, well into the future. It is something she takes great pride in. All my clothes are made by her.

The apprenticeship with the tailor has served her well. Alma sews for a living, and her clients are invited into the living room which acts as Alma's studio. Of all the clients who visit Alma over the years, in this house and in South Avenue when we move, I remember only two; Miss R is one of them. I remember her partly because of her bulk. In the fog of my early years, she is there with her expansive backside sticking out like a corseted ledge, like a shelf you might rest a cup on. I remember Alma talking of throwing the tape measure around her hips, launching it from one side and hoping to catch it at the other.

Alma lives with a tape measure around her neck and a small red notebook in which she keeps her clients' measurements. When I'm older and if I'm around, Alma will take measurements and I will write them down in her red book. This is how I learn her trick of declaring aloud the client's chest, waist, and hip measurements, but subtracting two or three inches which she will later add back. This keeps her clients very happy. Sometimes they disagree with her and always in those situations she writes down the number they insist on while remembering how much she needs to add. Later they will say: you see I told you I was only 36, 24, 36.

When Alma married Kit in 1949, she made her wedding dress and five bridesmaid dresses, as well as Edith's outfit. For a long time, the wedding dress lived in the bottom of Alma and Kit's wardrobe, wrapped in tissue, inside a box. She would occasionally get it out but it was not for dressing up, it was not a plaything. It was creamy white with a sweet-heart neckline, long and silky, made in a jacquard fabric, and it had a million covered buttons down the back and on the sleeves. It was a work of art, the very best of Alma, and it saddens me that somewhere along the way it was lost. Was it discarded by Alma? Thrown off like the skin of a former self: the naive, nineteen-year-old who had married into a life she already longed to escape.

School Uniform 1

I start school early, the year I am four. Edith knows the Headmistress, a force to be reckoned with. This is most likely instrumental in getting me a place. I am in love with school. All of it: sugar paper, frozen winter-milk, books and pencil shavings, fat wax crayons in wooden boxes, shared desks, rush mats and bean bags. My days are full. I have friends in the playground.

I know how to do exactly as I’m told. When to speak, when to learn. Afternoons and Listen with Mother on the radio, we lie on our mats and soak in words. Friday afternoon in Mrs T’s class; the dressing up box is out: crepe dresses, velvet hats with broken feathers, old men’s jackets. We adorn ourselves in cheap satins, faux pearls and moth-eaten furs. We parade our finery in the yard, overseen by Mrs T, as gentle and kind as her powdered cheek with its hint of rouge.

It’s spring when the Inspector calls, to inspect registers. He declares the class to be oversubscribed by one pupil. At four and a half, I am too young for school, so I’m told. They send me home at lunchtime and say I am not to come back. I go straight to Edith's and Jack's. I go there everyday for lunch anyway. I take the path past the fire station, down the lane and across the pub car park to the gate where I lift the latch and enter their small back yard.

Edith is in the kitchen, standing at the sink by the window, wearing a cross-over apron. A Senior Service non-tipped with an inch of ash dangles from the corner of her mouth. She's surprised to see me. I’m early. When I tell her what’s happened she bristles and tuts and waits for Jack to come home for lunch from the council depot. Then she puts on her coat and goes to the school.

At least this is what I imagine happened. I can’t say for sure but I know I was sad and Edith was cross and it was exactly the kind of thing she would do. Despite her decidedly working-class credentials: Edith was a girl out of the Welsh valleys and the mining communities, from the heart of Labour land, she had aspirations for her children and especially her granddaughter. Education was foremost among them.

Nothing could be done about me being sent home from school. School inspectors were powerful and could not be overruled. If Jack had had a plate of cockles for his lunch that day, as he often did, I would have sat on his lap at the table in the back room while he doused the cockles in vinegar and ate them with buttered bread. I would have shared them from his plate. I was unhappy at being sent home from school, but I was never unhappy to be with Edith and Jack.

A Dog Called Chang

And now, the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency...

It's Sunday morning in Edith's house; so many like these, including in the years after we move. I lie in the big bed, sun at the window, the bedroom door open. The smell of bacon frying in the pan drifts up the narrow stairs with the pulse of the radio. The pips are followed by the shipping forecast. A litany impossible to repeat, familiar yet unlearned, mysterious, full of time and place. Full of islands and boats, rocks and mermaids.

There are warnings of gales in Plymouth, Trafalgar, FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall and Malin...

A salve of words calling up the day like the dawn chorus, a lullaby to imagination and far-off worlds. The comfort of repetition, the rhythm of reassurance, a deep and sonorous, voice. And downstairs a table waits laid for breakfast, and after breakfast, a walk with Jack and Chang along the Berrow Sands.

I grow up thinking Jack's dog must be from China or Hong Kong or somewhere far away like that. Why else would it have a name like Chang? Edith, says chang has many meanings, among them: to sing, to chant, to be free. It's a handless cup, a dark blue colour, the deep green of the forest, it all depends on how it's written. Jack raises his eyebrows when Edith goes off like this, or when she speaks Welsh. But what does he know, he's not a good reader. Which is a secret, Edith tells me, though never to be mentioned. When Chang dies Edith holds the dying dog in her lap. Chang is buried on the allotment. Later Jack will get another dog, smaller and livelier, and name him, Nipper.

A Pear for an Heir

2024

We have lived in the same house for thirty-seven years. In years gone by I've been persuaded, mainly by J, that our garden is too small for a tree. He's the practical one. More recently our neighbour whose garden is of a similar size planted an apple tree which has flourished and every spring I admire its blossom and feel a pang of envy.

We, though I should say J, because the job fell to him, have reluctantly cut down the amelanchier. When I mention replacing it with a flowering cherry, for once he seems more favourably inclined.

We set off in hail and wind. It's a cold, wet, spring, to a local garden centre where after eyeing up the flowering cherries I fall in love with a pear: Papyrus Concorde, small, strong with creamy white blossom, it begs to be bought. The label tells me it will grow to 4m in ten years. Pears I read, can be easily pruned back.

J does the hard work of planting. My hands are no longer really up to the job. A friend tells me it’s an act of faith to plant a pear tree, a pear for an heir, so the saying goes. It makes me ridiculously happy to look from the kitchen window and see it in the corner where the irises grow.

I read that pears like sunshine. Since planting we have had a mixture of hail and rain, wind and occasional sun. It seems to be doing OK. I am hoping the tree will survive our being away on holiday. I feel very tenderly towards my new pear tree rather like the way I am beginning to feel about myself. In this slow, sometimes difficult process, I am learning to show compassion for the fragile but resilient child I was.

A Knitted Shawl

My brother, M, is born on a Sunday. It is Mothering Sunday, March 1956, and I am five. We are still living across the street from Edith. Alma is in labour all weekend, at home in Edith’s front room. I'm taken off out of the way by my uncles. I have three uncles who are my mother's brothers. There is a photo of me with them, I cannot be more than two or three, wearing goggles and seated on a Triumph 250 cc motorbike. They ride bikes, play football, swim when the tide's in, generally have fun. They are often crowded into Edith and Jack's back room.

We trail home late Sunday afternoon. When I'm tired of walking, they take it turns to hoist me onto their shoulders. I can see into the windows of Edith's neighbours' cottages, except there’s nothing to see but net curtains and dark interiors. Edith is there to meet us, waiting in the passageway as we come through the front door. She puts her fingers to her lips and tells us, Shush, pointing to the front room where Alma is sleeping behind the closed door. She ushers us into the back room. Jack and Kit are there, Kit has the baby in his arms, wrapped in a knitted shawl. He pats the sofa. I sit down next to him and he puts the baby in my lap. Edith shows me how to cup the baby's head in the crook of my arm. I hold his feet beneath the shawl.

The baby's head and face are blue after his long, exhausting struggle to make it into the world. A struggle that will go on for M. The fight for breath. I do not yet know how many times I will watch my brother battle asthma, or that one night the doctor will come and give him an injection of adrenaline to keep him alive. I do not know how many nights he will wake alone and frightened in his bed, his chest tightening and closing up. Later, he will have his asthma investigated. He will be sent away from home to Musgrove hospital though not for what good it will do other than to make him more miserable. They will say he has a good pair of lungs, and they cannot find the problem. When M is ill Alma panics. She does not comfort him. It’s Kit who comforts, when he's home. Kit who calms, rubs M's back and peels an orange for him which seems to help. But Kit is so often absent from our lives.

Jack gives me a half a crown piece and tells me to cross the baby's palm with silver to bring him health and wealth. When Alma and I go out with M in the pram, people stop us and do likewise.

My connection with M is made in the moment he is put in my arms and it never waivers. I am not, or ever will be jealous of him. He is handed to me like a gift. My brother is mine to love, mine to help and take care of. In that moment as I cradle him, I am not alone. M is in the world with me.

Some years later I learn that M tried to come out sideways, got stuck and nearly died and that Alma nearly died too. That she might have died if Edith hadn't sent Kit to fetch the doctor from the golf course. She'll be dead before the day's out if he doesn’t come, Edith had said. I learn this from Alma, when I am eight, when her habit of confiding in me without thought or boundary begins, when she tells me that the birth was agony, endless, hour after hour and that she can never go through it again. She cannot ever have another baby.

Rain

2024

It rains more than usual, the blossom drops from the pear. On the roadside verges the grass is knee high and speckled with buttercups. It doesn't stop raining. The world is grey, the sky is pewter, the light devoured by the trees and the hedges. I come from a place of rain, a landscape of fog. I am familiar with mists that lie like cobwebs above the land, pooling in the coombes. A sea of white. An absence.

I am in Oxford with my brother M. I ask him what he remembers about his early years with Alma. He says he remembers almost nothing. He remembers only an absence. Alma is missing, Kit too, and he doesn't have Edith and Jack to take their place as I did because we have moved. Besides which I was always Edith's favourite. But I understand that absence too. It lies like a sea fret over my early years with Alma. She is almost impossible to locate. I cannot conjure her face. It's Edith I see. Edith in the chair by the table, knitting and winding wool. Edith making pancakes in the kitchen. Polishing the brass and the cutlery, making suet puddings wrapped in cloth, picking loganberries. I smell the wallflowers and roses of her garden.

If I see Alma at all she is sat hunched over her sewing machine. Was she unhappy? Was she beginning to feel trapped like so many women of her generation, wondering what her life might have been? Longing for affection and love while living with a man unused to showing or talking about his feelings. Had it all been a mistake, marrying Kit? I think the answer would be, yes. But I have nothing to go on other than what happened later. And other than the absence which M and I experienced.

I lose a long series of notes made on my phone about the nature of absence and memory. I try every way I can to get them back but they've disappeared. I have so many fragments of this writing. They spill from my notebooks, from odd scraps of paper, from my computer desktop. I try to rationalise and organise these words but they elude me. Like memory itself they insist on being scattered. I have to trust that what's important will surface when I need it. I have never been this far into a project and had so much writing hidden away.

Bucket and Sand, Sea and Shell

2024

I was never sold on the idea of becoming a grandmother. It didn’t seem particularly important to me. After all I'd brought up my own two children and that seemed job enough. There were things I still wanted to do: stories, novels, poems to write. I wasn’t longing like some potential grandmothers to hold a baby in my arms. And I never wanted to be called grandma because it was what my children called Alma, and it would remind me too much of her.

Of course, I didn't have any say in the matter and what a good thing that was. These innocent, beautiful girls fill my heart with love. They are so fragile and so vulnerable that I sometimes feel my heart breaking when I am with them. I watch them on the beach on our family holiday, side by side but each separate in their own world of bucket and sand, sea and shell. I watch them and my heart is suddenly, inexplicably, in my mouth. A wave catching me unawares, an undertow pulling me out to all my past drownings. I cannot define this feeling except to say it is about danger, visceral but impossible to pin down. Thankfully it does not last, the feeling dissipates. The fear retreats. As I watch them being held, as I see how they are cherished and cared for, I come back to the safety of now and of the land beneath my feet.

In the early days of becoming a grandmother, this feeling of danger, this fear recurs often and unannounced. It comes without warning or reason and I have to swallow it down. I remind myself of just how safe the children are. It comes less and less as time goes on, but when the children are hurt or upset, or being told off, I sense it still hovering on my shoulder.

When we return from holiday the first thing we do is check on the pear tree. It looks strong but it's leaning and we think it could do with extra support. J finds a stake, paints it black and hammers it gently into the ground at the back of the pear to support it better. It looks instantly straighter, taller.

The sun comes out and we spend our days in the garden so that it looks better than it has in a long time. It is important to me this year that the garden thrives. There is nothing fancy here, just purple and pink aquilegia, a clematis on the fence, a rampant honeysuckle on another. Blue irises, tall and slender, a blowsy but small rhododendron, a spreading patch of lily of the valley, a scattering of foxgloves and alliums, some newly planted cosmos. Evenings are warm enough to sit out in the garden with a glass of wine.

Every Brilliant Thing - A Note on Suicide

It's 1960, the summer before my 9th birthday. The lupins and peonies are flowering in the small square of our front garden when my mother Alma attempts suicide.

We have moved to a new council estate in Highbridge, a mile and a half from the sea and a world away from Edith's and Jack's, though we still go there for our lunch during term times, and spend days with them during the holidays. Our lives have become increasingly sad and difficult, dominated by Alma's depression and despair. A despair I will spend my childhood trying to alleviate, hoping to mend. A despair that inevitably leaves its mark on me.

Johnny Donahoe, in his funny, compassionate and extraordinary play, Every Brilliant Thing, tells the story of a child and his suicidal mother.

He says, 'The real risk was that one day I would wake up and do what my mum did because there was a crystal-clear understanding of why you might not want to go on living.'

Such understanding permeates the skin of a child. The child knows no better. Attempting suicide is just what some grown ups do.

In the aftermath of Alma's suicide attempt and subsequent breakdown, when life has become desperately difficult and sad, I enter the bathroom and lock the door. I am nine years old. I stand in the cold, white, room and stare into the mirror on the cabinet above the sink. I understand that I am alone and only I can save myself.

'I can do this once,' I whisper at the mirror. 'Once, but if I have to live through this again, I will kill myself.' It is a pact I make with myself, one that I never forget. If all else fails, I have this to fall back on. I can make it through this fearful, lonely time, but only once. I will never have to do it again, I promise myself. I have a way out.

The title of the play, Every Brilliant Thing, refers to a list of brilliant things the child compiles to persuade his mother that life is worth living. What would my list look like stretched across the years?

Companionship, listening, consoling, sharing her secrets and confessions, always her needs before mine, cups of tea and toast in bed, a peach bought from my first wages, punnets of strawberries, poems written for her, pretending to be her sister, never stealing the limelight, achieving highly - but never highly enough, dampening down any joy and happiness of mine, making no demands of her, giving flowers, gifts, cards, cajoling, apologising, never being seen, the list will grow. The list will be endless.